1. Technology These days most people don't consider the technology that goes into a CGI movie. It's assumed that the computer does most of the work and those involved simply take the accolades. But that thinking is naive, as computer graphics have evolved dramatically since the first CGI scenes were incorporated into movies and, in many ways, Pixar has always been at the bleeding edge of what was technically possible. The animated film Brave used RenderMan's "messy hair technology" Life of Pi won an Oscar on it’s (Renderman) effects

2. RENDERMAN RAY TRACING: is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of visual realism. It is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and dispersion phenomena GLOBAL ILLUMINATION: (shortened as GI) or indirect illumination is a general name for a group of algorithms used in 3D computer graphics that are meant to add more realistic lighting to 3D scenes. Such algorithms take into account not only the light which comes directly from a light source (direct illumination), but also subsequent cases in which light rays from the same source are reflected by other surfaces in the scene, whether reflective or not (indirect illumination). RenderMan (formerly PhotoRealistic RenderMan), RenderMan Studio and RenderMan Pro Server are proprietary photorealistic 3D rendering software based on their own RenderMan Interface Specification. It is produced by Pixar and is used to render all of their in-house 3D animated movie productions. It is also available as a commercial product licensed to third parties. It primarily uses the Reyes algorithm but is also fully capable of doing ray tracing and global illumination. REYES RENDERING: is a computer software architecture used in 3D computer graphics to render photo-realistic images. It was developed in the mid-1980s by Loren Carpenter and Robert L. Cook at Lucasfilm's Computer Graphics Research Group, which is now Pixar. It was first used in 1982 to render images for the Genesis effect sequence in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

3. The CGI achievements of Pixar TOY STORY: The fact this could be made at all was probably the biggest innovation. It's unfeasible not to acknowledge the importance of Toy Story in the history of CGI, as it was the point at which the impossible became possible. Unusually for the Academy of Motion Pictures, they actually noticed its significance, and awarded John Lasseter, a special Oscar in 1996 "for the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film“. Toy Story proved that CGI could be used to tell a character-based story, and in doing so changed the world of animation forever. A BUG’S LIFE: Pixar continued pushing the animation and with extra computing power available in 1998 it allowed them a little 'soft body' extravagance with Heimlich the caterpillar. TOY STORY 2:In the original, not wanting to push the technology too far, Pixar limited the screen time of human characters. But in Toy Story 2 they're much more apparent. The highlight of this production was certainly the fabric handling routines that allowed Woody to be sewn up and repaired.

4. The CGI achievements of Pixar continued MONSTERS INC: For very obvious reasons, in Toy Story Pixar avoided hair. It eats vast amounts of computing cycles to calculate, move and render, but in Monster's Inc it finally bit the bullet on exploring that requirement. To prove it'd mastered hair entirely, it made Sully - one of the two main characters - entirely covered in long fine fur. In the movie, it's required to be blown by the wind, be moved by hand and generally look real at all times. FINDING NEMO: In a word, 'underwater'. Creating believable visuals for numerous types of ocean environment was the challenge Pixar had here, along with portraying the various states of the sea surface. But along with that challenge, it also simulated the movement of bubbles and characters caught in eddies and currents, most frames needed to be fully rendered. THE INCREDIBLES: The visual styling of this movie hides a significant change in the capability of Pixar's CGI technology. It's Pixar's first film that has an entirely human cast, using long flowing hair and realistic folding and tearing.

5. The CGI achievements of Pixar continued CARS: These came with their own problems, mechanical objects with suspension and friction with the ground, not least designing them to move believably. But with 1,000 times the computing power of the systems that rendered Toy Story, Pixar did have some scope for calculating more complex interactions between objects, and also handling reflections and imperfections. RATAOUILLE: Sequences where the rat ends up in water and then emerges with wet fur created challenges for Pixar, however lots of other special software technology was designed for this specific film. WALL-E: Technically, WALL·E built on the texture representations of environmental decay, like rust and general wear and tear. But the biggest achievement of this movie is to present a mechanical object as having a personality, something for which those who animated WALL·E should be genuinely proud. Other notable achievements in WALL·E are the subtle atmospherics, lighting and the emulation of the 70mm camera traits typical of Super Panavision 70 shot science fiction movies of the 60s.

6. UP- Technological Issues Challenge: to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house. There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons, especially not when you consider that every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. But even standard computer animation wouldn't be up to the task, because of the N-squared complexity involved in the thousands of interdependent balloons. Instead, the studio's computer whizzes figured out a way to turn the problem over to a programmed physical simulator, which, employing Newtonian physics, was able to address the animation problem. "These are relatively simple physical equations, so you program them into the computer and therefore kind of let the computer animate things for you, using those physics," said May. "So in every frame of the animation, (the computer can) literally compute the forces acting on those balloons, (so) that they're buoyant, that their strings are attached, that wind is blowing through them. And based on those forces, we can compute how the balloon should move." - This process is known as procedural animation. Procedural animation has been around for some time, but May suggested that even the most difficult uses of it in the past don't come close to what Pixar had to achieve in "Up.“ Pixar fans may remember the scenes in "Cars" of a stadium full of 300,000 car "fans" cheering on a high-speed race below, each of which was independently animated. That, too, was done with procedural animation

7. UP- Technological Issues May said Pixar's physical simulator, an open-source program called ODE, couldn't initially handle the complexity of modeling the behavior of more than 10,000 balloons."We could handle about 500 (balloons), and we knew we needed tens of thousands," he said. "We knew we needed to develop a new simulator software pipeline...to handle an order of magnitude more complex simulation.“ As producer Jonas Rivera put it, "The audience looks at (the balloon cluster) and says, 'Oh, that's pretty.' But they have no idea how much work went into it. We worked on that for over a year. (Then) the kid takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair. My mother will never know that took 15 people six weeks.“ There are 20,622 individual balloons supporting Carl's house when it first becomes airborne. It was also the first Pixar feature in 3D, using Disney Digital 3-D, which brought with it additional problems regarding textures and scene design that previous 2D productions never encountered.

8. Monsters University Bill Polson, Disney-Pixar's director of industry strategy : "We choose our characters based on the story, not on technology.“ Helping to make sure that the characters in these movies actually jump off the screen a tech collaboration with Nvidia was set up. Disney-Pixar used the new Quadro K6000 card ahead of public release while it was creating its current box-office success Monster's University. "We have been collaborating with Nvidia over the past year on real-time raytracing using their Optix technology," explained Polson. "The K6000 is the newest most powerful card capable of running this technology." Although Pixar continued to use its own Renderman software for final renders, according to Polson, coupling this with the K6000 meant previews were vastly improved. "The Kepler features allow us to get interactive previews that look much closer to final render," he explained. "Prior to this technology we were mostly looking at wireframes. Now we are looking at images that are getting close to final render. This enhances the artist's experience and lets us iterate much more quickly.” Nvidia's card is just one part of progress that Disney-Pixar has seen since it released Toy Story back in 1995. Computational power has changed drastically since. Back then it took four hours to render one frame; in 2009 when Toy Story was re-rendered for 3D it took around four minutes a frame. And don't expect this speed of innovation to change anytime soon. Steve May, chief technology officer for Disney-Pixar : "We are always looking to push the visual complexity of our films to support our stories, so we are always excited about higher computational capacity.“

9. Monsters University Once the skeletal wireframe is added it is on to layout All Disney-Pixar movies start off as a storyboard An artist then brings the movie to life in 2D Next up a wireframe helps map the look of the scene Simulation then adds meat to the digital bones Finished Product

10. RenderMan: Non-Commercial Use Pixar is to give away 3D RenderMan software free for non-commercial use ‘without any functional limitations, watermarking, or time restrictions. Non-commercial RenderMan will be freely available for students, institutions, researchers, developers, and for personal use.’ RenderMan, has faced increased competition from rival animation rendering programmes such as VRay and Arnold. Ian Dean, editor of computer graphics magazine 3D World, ‘[free RenderMan] could be seen as a reaction to the rise of alternatives such as Arnold,’ but that Disney/Pixar are also looking to "build a community". He added that RenderMan, which has been around for more than 25 years, was ‘very important at the higher end of the entertainment, animation and visual effects industries’. Lee Danskin, the technical director of Escape Technology, which sells RenderMan to VFX houses in the UK, welcomed the move, saying the software would be more widely adopted as a result. The company has also cut the price of its software for commercial use

11. Future A significant reason for Pixar's success can be found in the audience for its films. DeMartino noted that ‘the younger generation has not only grown used to computer graphics, it has come to appreciate the art form and expect more because of it.’ - Pixar rides this wave, but also drives it in many ways. ‘They just keep setting the bar higher and higher, with fantastic execution’ DeMartino said. Mar Elepano ‘They've found a way to make better movies than Disney,’ he said. ‘In some ways, they're doing it the old-fashioned way, by just having good people in place and concentrating on making movies that people want to see’. Estes explains, Pixar and other effects companies are always looking to improve on what they have made and raise the bar for the films that follow. One area of animation earmarked for improvement is the combination of character movement, lighting and wind, and what this does to the look of a character's hair and clothing. As for the future (or the future's future), it seems Pixar and its ilk won't ever be content.